How Brahms gave his music to the world

There are two compelling descriptions of Brahms composing: one by Brahms himself talking to his young friend the singer (and later conductor) Georg Henschel on 26 February 1876 during a train journey between Koblenz and Wiesbaden, the other by his biographer Max Kalbeck, who happened to meet him on one of his composing walks. Both in their different ways testify to intense mental activity away from manuscript paper: Brahms composed in the main, not at the piano or at his desk, but in his head. It is no surprise therefore to find his musical handwriting, when he came to write a piece down, characterised by a certain urgency. Of course he sketched and drafted (mostly destroying such material after it had served its purpose); but his writing out of the full form of a composition was usually as a working copy, which had running corrections as he changed his mind on details. The script is characteristically fluent, and all sorts of short-cuts are employed – including notational abbreviations, or ways of forming characters which are really economical (he used to combine leger-lines and note-stems into one stroke of the pen, and he developed a way of writing natural signs with one stroke too). His correction methods needed to be similarly efficient, and the two most common are surely also the two fastest – smearing the ink when still wet, then writing in the revised notation over the smear, or crossing something out in ink and replacing it alongside; on occasions he also used a knife to scrape out mistakes. The meaning of dynamic and articulation signs is usually clear as he wrote them, though the placement of crescendo and decrescendo hairpins can be approximate, increasingly so perhaps towards the bottom of pages.

Commentators from Brahms's century and our own have largely interpreted Schumann's prophetic remark about the ‘powers amassed in the orchestra and chorus’, on which Brahms should draw, as a reference to the Beethovenian symphonic tradition at mid-century and, specifically, the challenges posed by the choral finale of Beethoven's Ninth. Robert Schumann had certainly led his readers in that direction when, earlier in ‘Neue Bahnen’ (‘New Paths’), he refers to sonatas that were ‘veiled symphonies’ among those pieces the twenty-year-old Brahms played for Clara and himself in October of 1853. Nevertheless, it is likely that Brahms and his contemporaries understood Schumann's comment to refer at least as much to orchestrally accompanied choral music as to choral symphonies or symphonic music more generally. Schumann, after all, produced many of his large choral works during the last decade of his life, by which time his own style had veered decisively towards Mendelssohn's more traditional legacy. And when Brahms did finally establish himself as a major force on the German music scene in 1868 he did so with a major choral work of his own, Ein deutsches Requiem Op. 45, the largest piece he was ever to compose.

Given the tremendous success of that work and the various shorter works for chorus and orchestra that followed around 1870 (Alto Rhapsody Op. 53, Schicksalslied Op. 54, Triumphlied Op. 55), it is easy to lose sight of the fact that by 1868 Brahms had already produced a large number of choral works of more modest proportions and that he continued to compose choral music of all types for the next two decades. And whereas Brahms’s status as a composer of choral music is much acknowledged in the choral world, his signficance in this area among musicians at large has been overshadowed by his reputation as a symphonist and chamber music composer.

There exists an early photograph – a shadowy person, a stretch of wall – which dates from 1824: three years before Beethoven's death. It sets the mind racing with the thought that just such a primitive apparatus might well have been turned on Beethoven himself. Just as the early gramophone captured the last castrato, so a spectral image could well have existed of this extraordinary little man who even in his lifetime had become one of the great mythic figures of the civilisation of the West. Only a few years were to pass, and the next generation – Schumann, Berlioz, Chopin (beautifully, in that nakedly revealing tragic late photograph by Bisson) – are all recorded. Musicians, and many others: the heroic age of photography produced, in the hands of Nadar, startlingly immediate images of Baudelaire, which make him peculiarly our contemporary. Such images lend to the historical existence of those depicted something which all the documentation in the world cannot: this immediacy, this contemporaneity, this sense of Now. The invention of the camera created a great dividing line in our experience of the past.

Such thoughts arise when one gazes at the many existing photographs of Brahms. They put him in a different category to Beethoven, whom the passing of time has cut off from us, has reduced to a history-book figure. Brahms, by the aid of the camera, can be imagined as tenuously alive, as a real person to be seen walking about the streets of Vienna. The arguments for the greater truth of character portrayal achieved by the art of the portrait painter are still occasionally rehearsed and (more rarely) justified. It is also true that the typical nineteenth-century photograph is a posed one; whereas we esteem in a photograph a touch of the arbitrary, the fortuitous: the ‘snapshot’.

An approach to the music

The completion of my series of Brahms recordings with the London Classical Players provides an opportune moment to reflect on my approach to them. I have come to Brahms as the latest stage in a long exploration of musical performance from a historically-informed viewpoint which began with the Baroque era, continued into the classical era with Haydn and Mozart, and has stretched through the works of Beethoven and Schubert to the Romantics Mendelssohn, Berlioz and Schumann, and eventually to Brahms, Wagner and Bruckner. The aim has been to seek to restore as much as possible the relationship between the scores, which have not changed, and the instruments, forces and performing styles, which most certainly have. I wanted to find out how things actually were in the performing situation, to get the relationship right in order to enable the music to sound fresh and natural. The use of earlier instruments and playing styles does not force us to be old-fashioned: on the contrary, it ought to help us to re-create these masterpieces afresh. Like Schumann, Brahms has long had a reputation as a poor orchestrator, his textures being seen as overloaded and unclear. Though Brahms's scoring has had many detractors, I have never agreed with their objections. But there is equally no doubt in my mind that using the resources of his own time can tell us much about his orchestration, and about the music itself.

In December 1890, in a letter to his publisher Fritz Simrock, the fifty-seven-year old Johannes Brahms announced his intention to retire from composing: ‘With this scrap bid farewell to notes of mine – because it really is time to stop’. The ‘scrap’ in question was a part of the String Quintet in G major Op. 111, which the composer had completed during the previous summer. In February 1891, this new work appeared in print, together with a thorough revision made two years previously of the early Piano Trio in B major Op. 8, whose original version dated from 1854. The composer thus planned to make his valediction with two major chamber compositions which, like polished bookends, embraced the whole of his long and productive career.

Yet within only a few months of this letter Brahms was hard at work once more. In the summer of 1891, inspired by the skilful playing of Richard Mühlfeld, the principal clarinettist of the Meiningen Court Orchestra, he produced both the Trio in A minor for Piano, Clarinet and Violoncello Op. 114, and the Quintet in B minor for Clarinet and Strings Op. 115. Then, three years later, came still another pair of compositions featuring Mühlfeld's instrument – the two Sonatas for Piano and Clarinet, in F minor and E, major, Op. 120. And it was only with these masterpieces of old age, finally, that Brahms concluded a lifetime's preoccupation with chamber music.

Brahms's first visit to Vienna towards the end of September 1862 is often taken as inaugurating the major professional change of his life: the move from provincial Hamburg, with its hard upbringing and limited opportunities, to the city of the classic masters, and his subsequent dominance of its musical life as their greatest successor. Yet the reality is otherwise. Brahms settled into Vienna only very slowly and it could not really be called his home for upwards of a decade. These years spanned a difficult transition in both professional and personal life as he sought a career path and a domestic identity. The fight to realise his artistic aims and ambitions, begun in Hamburg was to continue for long years. It was only when he finally became established as a financially independent composer in Vienna, by the mid-1870s, that he really found stability and routine for his composition; prior to this, a pattern emerged rather by default.

It is difficult to know what Brahms first expected of Vienna. He had several contacts in Hamburg who would have encouraged him to make what was still a long journey – for example the composer Carl Peter Grädener (1812–83) and Bertha Porubszky, a Viennese girl who had been a member of his choir – in addition to the wider circle of musicians who performed in Vienna, beginning with his intimates Clara Schumann and Joseph Joachim. His first comments leave the issue open. He wrote shortly before leaving to his fellow composer Albert Dietrich, ‘I am leaving on Monday for Vienna! I look forward to it as a child. Of course I do not know how long I shall stay. We will leave it open and I hope to meet you some time during the winter. Pray do not leave me quite without letters’, leaving Dietrich some business addresses rather than a private one or hotel.

Ever since Schumann, in ‘Neue Bahnen’, told the world that a twenty-year-old unknown from Hamburg had played him ‘sonatas, or rather veiled symphonies’ (‘Sonaten, mehr verschleierte Symphonien’), Brahms's works have been open to charges of inconcinnity, or at least ambiguity, of genre. Wagner, in ‘On the Application of Music to Drama’ (‘Über die Anwendung der Musik auf das Drama’, 1879), suggested a contrary formal mismatch: for him the Brahms symphonies were essentially ‘transplanted’ chamber music, ‘quintets and the like served up as symphonies’. This leitmotif was long recycled by Brahms's detractors, and some of his more discriminating friends. All polemics aside, certainly in Brahms the streams of orchestral, chamber and instrumental music flow in unusually close proximity. Seemingly these genres did not require any sharp differentiation in his expressive aims, or the means of their realisation: all partook equally of his highly personal synthesis of romantic, classical and pre-classical techniques, and his ongoing development of post-Beethovenian sonata discourse.

Brahms's orchestral scores, moreover, reflect his development of a genuine and original orchestral style which deployed colour neither for its own sake, nor for merely pictorial or anecdotal effect. His orchestration relates colour to structure, to embody and articulate a dramatic but intricately developing musical argument with the directness and clarity, the identity of idea and expressive medium, of the smaller, ‘purer’ ensembles of his chamber and instrumental works.

Brahms's works for solo piano can be neatly grouped according to the four periods typically discerned within his music. The Sonata Op. 1, Sonata Op. 2, Scherzo Op. 4, Sonata Op. 5, Schumann Variations Op. 9 and Ballades Op. 10 are early pieces, dating from 1851 to 1854; the larger variation sets – Op. 21, Op. 24, Op. 35 – and Waltzes Op. 39 fall within the ‘first maturity’ (1855–76); the Klavierstücke Op. 76 and Rhapsodies Op. 79 belong to the ‘second maturity’ (1876–90); while the last four sets, Opp. 116–19, form part of the late music (1890–6). In addition to these solo works, the two piano concertos date respectively from 1854–9 and 1878–81, and there are of course numerous chamber compositions with piano. But the focus in this chapter is on Brahms's solo piano music, in particular four works serving as cross-sections of the stylistic succession outlined above: the second movement from Op. 5, the Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Handel Op. 24, the Capriccio Op. 76 No. 5 and the Intermezzo Op. 118 No. 6.

My purpose in isolating these four is not only to complement the broad-brush approach taken by enough other authors to make such a survey redundant here,1 but to explore the tension between what Denis Matthews calls ‘a definite plurality in Brahms’s musical makeup’ (three principal phases, respectively architectural, contrapuntal and lyrical in nature, defined by the use of classical forms in the early sonatas, the rediscovery of Bach and Handel in the variation sets, and the pre-eminence of melody in the late miniatures) and, in contrast, the stylistic unity or integrity apparent from the composer’s very first works for piano through to his late music. As Matthews comments, Brahms’s style ‘was to change little in a lifetime.

Since the completion of the last of them in the summer of 1885, all four Brahms symphonies have enjoyed a more or less regular stay in the core repertory. Though they represent a small output relative to the vast output of chamber music, as well as to the symphonies of his contemporaries and successors, Brahms's symphonies have established a major position in the concert hall; a challenge to orchestras both in balance and in the quality of playing in all departments, they still represent a means by which the highest orchestral standard is judged. Yet for the listener they have an added dimension. Perhaps more than any of the symphonic works with which they might be compared in the later nineteenth century, they embody a complex set of musical statements, gestures or ‘utterances’ that open up different structural interpretations and relations of ideas. For some listeners, the framework for the apprehension of these features is the classical exterior and the secure grounding in an Austro-Germanic musical tradition, giving these works their unique emotional, spiritual and intellectual appeal; others will cite the creativity with which Brahms met the very challenge of symphonic composition after Beethoven, a challenge inseparable from that of symphonic composition in the time of Liszt and Wagner. The aesthetic contradictions and paradoxes inherent in his solutions are an essential part of the works' appeal.

Brahms's biographers have often remarked that these large-scale works were composed within a single decade, 1875–85. To some extent, then, they spring from a single creative impulse. Although traces of it extend as far back as 1862, the First Symphony was not completed until September 1876, the bulk of the composing having taken place in 1875–6. Within the space of a single year, however, the Second Symphony followed. Then there was a lull, as Brahms turned to other projects, among them the Violin Concerto and the Second Piano Concerto, completed in 1878 and 1881 respectively. The Third Symphony was finished during the summer of 1883.

Family background

Brahms's family associations with North Germany were long and deep. His forebears on his mother's side came from Schleswig-Holstein. They can be traced to Itzehoe, Tondem, Leck and Flensburg, and included school teachers, pastors and aldermen, several of whom belonged to the Schleswig-Holstein minor nobility: one of the most famous of them, the engraver Melchior Lorch (1527–86, the creator of the so-called ‘Elbekarte’ which bears his name), was also a prominent portrait painter. Research on the mother's side reveals a line traceable to connections with the Swedish king Gustav Wasa (1496–1560). Brahms's maternal grandfather, Peter Radeloff Nissen, migrated from Itzehoe to Hamburg, where, on 4 July 1789, Brahms's mother, Johanna Henrica Christiane Brahms, was born. The forebears on the paternal side led from Heide in Holstein, the birthplace of Brahms's father, Johann Jacob, to Brunsbüttel and further over the Elbe back to Lower Saxony, to the area between the Elbe and the Weser. It was from there that Peter Brahms, Brahms's great-grandfather, migrated to Holstein around 1750. His son Johann came from Brunsbüttel via Meldorf to Wörden, a suburb of Heide. His firstborn son, Peter Hinrich, Brahms's uncle, later occupied the house that still exists today as the Heide Brahmshaus, (now in the possession of the Schleswig-Holstein Brahms Gesellschaft). In another, strongly built house in the market place in Heide, Brahms's father, Johann Jacob, was born. The paternal forebears were chiefly craftsmen and minor tradesmen.

Brahms's view of song

Brahms wrote songs throughout his life. They provide a constant backcloth to his larger instrumental works, to which they often relate quite tangibly. A solid core has remained in the repertory since Brahms's time, and they are well represented in the current recording catalogue, as prominent as those of his predecessors Schubert and Schumann, whom he so admired. Yet there has always been a discernible tendency among critics to exclude Brahms from an ultimate canon of great German Lieder composers comprising Schubert, Schumann and Wolf; indeed Brahms is even sometimes included in a list with much lesser figures of the genre such as Mendelssohn, Franz and Cornelius. There are obvious reasons for this. First of all, the fact that Brahms did not set the greatest poems, rather preferring the work of minor figures, whose verse he might more easily transform: from this it is assumed that he lacked the knowledge of or the discernment of the composers who did. Since by this reckoning, great songs are seen as critiques of great poetry, responding to the challenge presented by a poem which is independently known, Brahms's songs are excluded since they offer no such comparisons. To this conclusion is harnessed the fact that Brahms is sometimes seen as displaying awkwardness in the musical rendering of verbal accentuation, a consequence of his emphasis on rounded melody. One might further add in such an assessment that Brahms avoids the lengthy groups or cycles that show a capacity for reflecting psychological development. In short, that he is an instrumentally rather than verbally driven composer.

Music in the public sphere: Brahms and the spectre of Wagnerism

The writing of music history frequently gains its primary impetus from that which we regard in our own time as great music: those works through which we have chosen to define the essential achievement and identity of a composer. Working backwards, so to speak, from a retrospective evaluation of an entire corpus of music, we distort biography and history to fit our judgements, justifying our own tastes through the medium of scholarly historical explanation. In the case of Johannes Brahms, his popularity and renown are now most often associated with his orchestral music. Therefore, among the most carefully scrutinised aspects of his evolution as a composer is his presumedly difficult and sustained struggle with the task of writing a symphony. His first explicit public foray into this genre was completed relatively late in his career. The C minor Symphony was finished and first performed in 1876. Brahms was already well established and world famous. His substantial early reputation throughout Europe obviously did not derive from his work as a composer of symphonies. His most spectacular success before the completion of Op. 68 was achieved with Ein deutsches Requiem in 1868 and (with the added fifth movement) in 1869. The prominent Berlin critic Louis Ehlert, who considered himself a fair-minded but not uncritical Brahms enthusiast, had little doubt, writing in 1880, that the symphonic form was not, and would likely never be, Brahms's forte.